Okay, so I love college. I really do. But at a time like this when we’ve all had a couple weeks of no classes, midterms, finals or waking up excruciatingly early — some of us might not exactly be jumping up and down about everything that comes with another quarter of school.
So for my first column of the quarter I’m writing about a place that is kind of a little getaway from all of that. I’m sure that just about everyone has seen (or at least heard of) monarch butterflies.
Once in a while you might see one flying around or sitting on a flower looking pretty. But have you ever seen 23,000 of them in one place?
You guessed it, there’s a place right around here where you can do that — the monarch butterfly grove in Pismo Beach. Butterflies come here every year to hibernate and survive the winter.
The butterflies gather in a grove of trees in Pismo State Beach from October until February, so you’ve still got plenty of time to go check it out. There’s also a butterfly grove in Morro Bay State Park.
The docents for the butterfly grove are part of the California State Parks system and supported by the Central Coast Natural History Association, according to executive director Mary Golden. They give talks every day at the grove and can answer just about every question you have about the monarchs.
Jo Moore, one of the docents who gave me a mini-education in monarch butterflies, said five butterfly counts are conducted each season. During the 1990-91 season there were 230,000. Yeah, that’s not a typo. Moore wasn’t working at the grove then, but told me that people said the butterflies were “just like hanging clusters.”
“Can you imagine 230,000?” Moore said. “I would hope to see someday that there’s that many here.”
You can’t really see the butterflies from the road, and it took me a little while to find them. When they’re all gathered up in the trees they look like brown leaves — but that’s because the undersides of their wings are actually brown. It keeps them from being seen by predators when they’re resting.
“Where else do you see this number of butterflies?” Moore said. “I’m meeting the coolest people from everywhere. People come from all over the world (to see the butterflies).”
The grove was discovered in 1940, said Merrill Whaley, another docent. She also said a count conducted last Thursday tallied 23,000 butterflies in the grove.
In February, the butterflies will come down from the trees and start their mating, and then the females will fly away and lay as many eggs as they can before they die. The next four generations that follow will travel farther away from the grove and live about four to six weeks, Whaley said.
However, the fifth generation lives for several months, and Moore said those butterflies seem to know it’s the right time of year to go back to Pismo Beach. She also said when the butterflies stay here, their goal is primarily to survive the winter — not to look for food.
Whaley said the fifth generation is born with a larger stomach to help them store more food before they come back here.
Butterflies don’t seem like they would be the most hardcore of species, but according to Moore, they can travel up to 200 miles a day.
And do you know how they keep from getting eaten by other animals like birds or mice? They’re toxic. The only plant that females will lay their eggs on (and the only thing that the caterpillars will eat) is milkweed, which doesn’t poison the butterflies but makes them toxic to anyone who tries to eat them. Moore said birds might try eating them once, but “they won’t do it twice.”
Unfortunately, milkweed is a weed, so it’s not really embraced by people like farmers or cattle raisers, Moore said. It’s getting less and less common as more people get rid of it, and so that means butterflies have fewer and fewer places to lay their eggs. Moore said “we’re probably the (butterflies’) biggest enemy.” This year live milkweed was sold at the grove, and they encourage people to grow their own to counteract the dwindling milkweed numbers .
You really have to go check out this butterfly grove before they leave in February. Just go. It’s really one of those experiences that makes you realize how awesome nature is, and how things like butterflies have been taking care of themselves long before we came along and will keep on going long after us.
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